[Fangman]

Modern technology will have to do well to beat this. Taken in 1910 and found in a box of glass 5x4 plates mouldering in an outhouse in the village having been there for possibly 50+ years in cold and damp.

Scanned in - some tidying but less fuss than converting digital to mono and prnted. Putting together part of my collection of old village photos with recent shots of same views round the village for talk on Wednesday evening (Hope the digital projector is working) and still impressed by the quality of the images in spite of gross mis-treatment.

[Markulous]

A nice shot too! Great story to it

But, of course, with modern digital, any shots will be as fresh in 100 years as they are today - whether they should see the light of day is another matter!

[orangepeel]

Originally Posted by Markulous

But, of course, with modern digital, any shots will be as fresh in 100 years as they are today

I would guess your assumption is based on the premiss that you can read the digital file in 100 years. Which imo is a pretty big assumption.

[Markulous]

Originally Posted by orangepeel

I would guess your assumption is based on the premiss that you can read the digital file in 100 years. Which imo is a pretty big assumption.

Think the biggest assumption would be that I'm still around then!

There's much made of file readability - but I've yet to come across a situation where there's a requirement that can't be met. The file structures will be readily available, so I personally guarantee (cast iron - sue me if disappointed!) that all files will be readable, by someone, somewhere!

[Dave]

Mmmmm need to talk to daughter about handing down Pixalo to her to run in future Steve hurry up & have a baby....Fangman's set us a challange

Bit worried what Markulous will look like in a 100 years mind you

[orangepeel]

there's 3 issues with that.

• Storage Medium - You'll need a storage format capable of being readable in 100 years. Writable CD disks are said to have a 10 year life (although there are supposedly long life disks available). DAT tapes are around 10 years as well. Floppy disks are around 2 minutes, ZIP disks are 2 - 10 years. USB flash drives, 2-10 years. HDD 2-10 years. Your best bet atm is DVD which is supposedly 30-100 years.
• Hardware - You are hard pressed to get your hands on a 5 1/4" floppy drive reader, let alone a cable and motherboard that'll read it. And that's only a 30 year old technology!
• File formats - You have to hope that the format is still supported 100 years from now. Sure, a binary bit is the same no matter what the file is but the time and effort involved it rewriting file handling for a defunct format hardly bears thinking about. Writing a new file format is easy. Trying to read an existing one with no guides as to the layout is not quite as simple.

All those factors puts reading 100 year old digital files solidly into the realms of professional forensic style pricing. Hardly the same as digging hard copy out of an old privvy.

To say nothing of how any 'puter storage medium would react to being abandoned for 50 years to the cold and damp.

[Fangman]

Originally Posted by orangepeel

All those factors puts reading 100 year old digital files solidly into the realms of professional forensic style pricing. Hardly the same as digging hard copy out of an old privvy.

To say nothing of how any 'puter storage medium would react to being abandoned for 50 years to the cold and damp.

These are my feelings - It is still possible to do a photographic print from this plate - and provided fixed well that will last a good 100 years. I am scanning to reproduce for display prints a good bit older that 100yrs but am concerned that without EXTRA special care our ink-jet prints will not make it that long. The art is to re-archive out images ont the latest media before the current one expires - like the 5.25 floppy - just thrown some out! Even neglected plates and negatives are maling it well past the 100 yr mark.

[Markulous]

Yeah, but the problem with anything chemical: entropy will continue, so you will eventually lose it!

Not so with digital! If I put something up in the web it'll be there forever (providing it gets copied to new media as time goes on). Same with photos. Providing they get transferred to the latest whizzy storage device, no worries.

I have stuff that is over 20 years old which is still on my hard disks. Why delete it when it takes up such little space - and it just gets copied onto my next replacement hard drive. All my photos are on hard disks as I don't find CDs/DVDs reliable enough - and hard drives are cheap (one reason why I've more than 3TB in disk)

[Fangman]

The trouble will come when we go as i can't see our offspring going through old hard drives and copying and updating the archiving in the same way as photos and negatives have lasted in boxes and albums in lofts and sheds two or three generations. Old computers are liable to just get dumped on house clearence by executors unless generations can be trained to keep hard drives as we ours to never throw out photos.

[Rob Barron]

This is a fascinating discussion and frankly I am not technically advanced enough to make any firm assertions one way or the other. However, one thing I do know is that actually there is nothing that fantastic about the technology being used today to store images. All digital records, be they text, graphics, audio, video, etc. are all stored the same way: a long series of digits that exist in just two forms: On and Off, or 1 and 0, whichever way you want to look at it.

Whilst not many of us have still got a 5 1/4" disk reader these days (even 3 1/2" disks are becoming rarer) that doesn't negate the ability to read the contents of a disk if you were to rig up a reading head and a spindle that spins at the right speed. That is, in essence, all a disk recorder/player is. So, in 100 years from now it will surely not be beyond the ability of a fairly average technophile to read the information they want to get off a disk. It is true that the disk itself might deteriorate but if the disk is copied before that has taken place, it will record a perfect copy and the time starts all over again, probably with a longer lasting disk next time round.

Despite the changing world of technology and recording formats, it is perfectly possible today to read old disks, computer magnetic tapes, DATs, Records, and even wax cylinders. In 100 years from now, will we have the backward compatibility necessary? Yes, I think we will. Why? Because actually we are storing our pictures in an excellent form already and so I think we will continue along the same line in future, even though improvements will undoubtedly be made.

The digital age has made recovering old printed images a real possibility, even when the images are badly faded. I do this regularly as a paid service and Photoshop really does give you the tools to rescue something that looks beyond hope.

Of course, a century from now we might have all given up taken digital images altogether because we'll all be telepathic so we can transfer images to each other just by thinking about them!.... or not <g>

Cheers,
Rob

[Markulous]

Hmmm, well all tape, removable disks, hard disks use magnetic media so will fail with time, so they won't necessarily be recoverable

But the internet will play a massive role in the future. Already you can back up data (ISPs beginning to offer it) - in the future I see this being relatively commonplace. What safer place than on 'disaster recoverable' storage media and servers?

[orangepeel]

you guys ain't comparing like for like.

It was stated the the photos had been lying in a damp privvy for 50 years. Do that with any computer kit or backup media and it won't work. trust me.


As for this "digital data is just ones and zeros". That's a bit misleading tbh.

Digital data is formatted in such a way that blocks of these ones and zeros represent a different thing depending on what the file is actually intended for. For example, in very simple terms: -

Take a 24 bits...

111111110000000000000000

111111110000000000000000 could represent the colour red. But thats ONLY if you happen to know that each colour is in 24 bit blocks. And only if you happen to know that it's formatted as red, green, blue. And only if you start looking from the correct position. Shift left or right a few bits and you get completely different colours.

If for example each colour was represented in 12 bit then that block of 24 bits would actually represent 2 colours (a yellow pixel and a white pixel).
111111110000000000000000

Now that 111111110000000000000000 could also represent 3 characters in a text file or part of some audio data.


My point is, without actually knowing how the data is formatted the 1's & 0's of themselves are pretty useless.

So while it's true, digital data is at the base level, very simple, the complexity is in the format - which btw it a completely ephemeral thing which only exists in the mind of the programmer.

Files at their base level don't describe their own format. This is why you can chuck any file you like into a text editor and make changes to it. You may wreck the file but it is possible to do.


So if a file format becomes forgotten over time then yes it is possible to recover the data however it's not like picking up and opening a box you found in the dunny.

[Markulous]

Well, was kind of comparing like for like - the hidden corners of the internet to the dunny!

Can see situation where someone discovers a cache of photos............ and the password, on the internet. And so downloads them, 'discovering' them after 50 years!